Murder at the Falls (32 page)

Acta est fabula
, she thought. It was one of Tom’s Latin phrases: the drama has been acted out.

Charlotte returned to Paterson the next day at Voorhees’ invitation. He felt that he owed her a final accounting, he said. She had been excluded from the police’s interrogation of Jason. Protocol, Voorhees had said, and she had understood. Her involvement was unofficial, and, she was sure, would not have been welcomed by the higher-ups, had they known about it, which she doubted they did. Voorhees was shrewd enough not to have talked about it, and Martinez was shrewd enough not to talk, period.

She would miss Paterson, she thought as the highway skirted Garrett Mountain. The city lay spread out to her right, encircled by the protective ring of the Passaic River: a rich tapestry of red-brick factories and mills that glowed with a warm, rosy patina in the late September sun, the church steeples and smokestacks reaching for the sky like the bell towers of a Tuscan hill town. It was a particularly human town, where old Italian ladies sold bouquets of black-eyed Susans, and the local eatery gave free meals to the homeless. More like a small town than a city, a small town where everybody knew everybody else, and where everybody knew somebody who had worked in the mills, or somebody who still did.

Once she had gotten off the highway, it took only a few minutes to reach the public safety complex. After parking her car, she walked up to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation on the second floor.

“Did your daughter get to her meet on time?” she asked once she was comfortably settled in Voorhees’ office.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I was sorry I couldn’t make it. She took a first, which means that she qualifies for the nationals.”

“And if she wins in the nationals?”

“She’ll have a shot at the Olympics,” he said. He smiled. “Little did I know what I was letting myself in for when I signed her up for diving lessons all those years ago.”

“Congratulations,” said Charlotte.

“Thanks. We’ll see what happens. After years of training, a little injury could do her in. But meanwhile, she’ll have had a good time. At least I hope she’ll have had a good time.”

“Demetra,” said Charlotte. “That’s a Greek name, isn’t it?”

“You’re asking because I knew the word
philotimo?
”

Charlotte nodded. “I thought you might be Greek,” she said.

“Not me. I’m from old Paterson stock: Dutch, English, a little Irish. The Irish part worked in the mills. But my wife is Greek, so I know a little of the lingo. I’ve been in the doghouse with her relatives ever since I arrested John. I’m glad I’m going to be able to clear his name. Can I get you some coffee?”

“Thanks” said Charlotte. “Black is fine.”

Voorhees disappeared into the adjoining room, and returned a moment later with two cups of coffee. He handed one to Charlotte, and sat down with the other in his swivel chair. Then he said, “I want to thank you. Without you, I never would have solved this case.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Charlotte.

“It’s true; the key was the aprons. I’m very grateful. I like the fact that I’ll be finishing up my career with a closed case.” He made a gesture of finality with his hands. “Nice and neat.”

At Charlotte’s questioning look, he explained. “I’ve put in for early retirement. We can put in at twenty years. I have another career to manage now.” He nodded at the photo of Demi.

“It sounds as if it’s going to be a full-time job.”

“Close to it,” he said. “My thanks to your husband, too,” he said. “We’re very grateful for his help. Will you be seeing him?”

“I doubt it. He’s about to become my ex-husband,” she added with a rueful smile, “but I do expect to be talking to him.”

“I wish you’d pass along our thanks. I understand,” he added. “I’m going through the same thing myself. My wife and I have been separated for sixteen years. She’s been in a mental institution.”

“Since your daughter was an infant!” said Charlotte.

He nodded. “I never wanted to divorce her—for Demi’s sake. For a long time, I hoped she would get better. And she did sometimes, but then she’d go off again. But”—he shrugged—“there comes a time. Sixteen years is a long time to be lonely.”

Charlotte berated herself for making a judgment about his being a ladies’ man when he was just reaching out for some human warmth. She remembered his wry acknowledgment of her observation that people do strange things in the name of love. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged again. “We recovered the paintings, by the way.”

“Where were they?”

“The frames were exactly where Spiegel said they would be. In Armentrout’s storage room. The canvases had been rolled up and stored in a vault right here in downtown Paterson. Armentrout told us where they were. He’s angling for a light sentence.”

“Did he confess to the murder?”

“Yes. After the party, he dropped Diana off and then continued on. He was passing the mill when he saw Goslau passed out on the sidewalk. He stopped with the idea of helping him, and then got the idea of throwing him in the raceway.”

“So Diana wasn’t involved.”

“No. She didn’t even know. But she was in on the scheme to sell the paintings. She just thought Jason was taking advantage of a situation in which Goslau was dead.” He took a sip of coffee, and then said: “He used Goslau’s key to get into the mill.”

Charlotte slapped a palm to her forehead: “Of course!” she said. “And here I was wondering whether Randy would have given him one.” She was reminded of Tom’s Latin phrase: “Sometimes even the good Homer dozes.”

Voorhees chuckled. “I can’t say that I was too quick on the uptake on that one myself. Some detectives we are, huh? He couldn’t find any rope—that’s when he remembered giving Randy the aprons.”

“I suppose he used Randy’s keys to open the gate too.”

Voorhees nodded. “Now, here’s the interesting part: while Armentrout was wrapping Goslau up, he started coming around. Whereupon Armentrout went back inside for the bottle of Courvoisier, and then poured it down Goslau’s gullet.”

“So that bottle hadn’t been consumed by an upscale wino.”

“Nope.” As far as I’m concerned, that bottle of Courvoisier is the difference between taking advantage of a situation—if that’s what you want to call throwing an unconscious cokehead in the drink—and premeditated murder.”

“Motive?”

“Greed, as usual. It’s always greed. Or almost always greed. You were right about his being in financial trouble. The trust fund had run out, and he was in debt up to his eyeballs. He’d been living off Diana, but they had exhausted her resources, too.”

Just then, the phone rang.

“Excuse me,” said Voorhees as he reached to answer it.

A second later he had hung up. “That was the chief of the rescue squad. They’re about to start trying to retrieve Spiegel’s body. They would have done it yesterday, but they thought it would be top dangerous for the divers. Are you interested in going over?”

Charlotte said she was, and they arrived shortly after the rescue squad, which had already lowered a rubber boat over the retaining wall at the Falls overlook. Joining the throng of spectators, they watched the divers search the area where Spiegel had landed.

It was tough work. Though the volume of water was less than the day before, it was still heavy and the divers kept getting dragged downstream by the current, and having to be pulled back.

“How deep is the water there?” asked Charlotte.

“About twenty-five feet. Deep enough so that the current shouldn’t have carried the body very far.”

“Especially if it’s weighted down by a wheelchair.”

Just then, one of the divers popped to the surface and pointed at the spot where he had just come up. The rescue workers in the boat tossed him a grappling hook, and then he dove back down again. It was the same spot that John had pointed out to her, the spot where the body they’d thought was Spiegel’s had come up.

This time, the diver was down for quite a while. He finally came back up and signaled for the men on the boat to start reeling in the winch. They turned for several minutes before the bumper of the Amigo broke the water. Next came the steering mechanism, and finally the seat. Spiegel was still strapped in, his camera still around his neck.

Though the face was bloated from decomposition, there was no mistaking the white hair and the beard. “Guess it’s Spiegel, all right,” said Voorhees, turning away from the upsetting sight. “Let’s go.”

“Nice and neat,” Voorhees had said. But it hadn’t been nice and neat, not by a long shot, Charlotte thought as they left. Two innocent people were dead; almost three. John Andriopoulis would probably have died anyway, but that wasn’t the case for Don Spiegel. She thought of the white, bloated body: how ironic that he had once escaped death at the Falls, only to succumb the second time. It seemed as if it was fated.

But that’s how things often happened. She had heard on the news only that morning about a traffic reporter who had died in a helicopter crash after surviving a similar crash only the week before.

As she looked back, Charlotte noticed the rainbow. It spanned the mouth of the gorge, one end emerging from the mist directly above the spot where they had pulled Spiegel’s body out. As she watched, the yellow-orange band dissolved into the mist, which carried it upward in copper-colored puffs. They reminded her of the puffs of incense that carried the soul of the departed to heaven.

Magical things were always happening in Paterson.

16

Charlotte paid a condolence call on Louise the next day. She had learned from Voorhees that Spiegel and his wife had reconciled before his death. He had been planning to give up his studio apartment in the Essex Mill and move back in with her and Julius.

His intentions became apparent as soon as Charlotte drew up to the house. The stairs leading up to the front door had already been covered over by a newly constructed wheelchair ramp. Charlotte walked up the ramp, and rang the doorbell.

Louise answered, and escorted Charlotte into a paneled living room filled with mission-style furniture that matched the period of the house. She looked well—far better than she had when Charlotte had seen her earlier that week.

“You were right about your husband not being dead,” Charlotte said. “You must have powers of extrasensory perception.”

She smiled, her nut-brown skin crinkling around the eyes. “I should have known when his mother didn’t come to the funeral. She said it was because she was sick, but if he’d really been dead, she would have been there, even if they’d had to carry her in on a stretcher.”

“I noticed the wheelchair ramp. Lieutenant Voorhees told me that your husband was planning to move back in with you.”

“Yes,” she said, “he was. The ramp was the least of it. We were also going to put in a new shower—one that he could wheel himself right into—and a studio for him. I’m going to go ahead with the studio anyway. I have hopes that Julius might want to use it some day.”

“Does he show an apptitude for art?” asked Charlotte.

“Very much so. He’s a very talented draftsman. But I don’t want to push him.” She laughed. “You know how teenagers are. If I encourage him to be an artist, he’ll probably want to be a rocket scientist, and vice versa. But it will be there for him, if he wants it.”

“I’m very sorry about your husband,” Charlotte said. “It seems a terrible tragedy that he had to die just when things were starting to go well for him.”

“That’s what I thought, too—at first,” she said. “But the more I think about it, the more I think that Don’s life as Ed Verre was a precious gift. Some people go an entire lifetime without ever coming to terms with themselves, with their creativity, with their God.”

“All of which happened to him in the last few months,” Charlotte said.

Louise nodded. “To say nothing of coming to terms with me. I’m glad we had the extra time together, however brief it was. Did he shown you his ‘Path of Experience’ series?”

“Four of them,” said Charlotte. “He hadn’t finished the fifth one yet.” She thought again of the fourth, the one that had prompted her to suspect him. The punishment that he was repenting of wasn’t that he had killed Randy, but that he had tried to drive him crazy. “I thought they were brilliant.”

“He finished the fifth one on the day of the hurricane. He was planning to expand the series to thirteen, which is the number in Blake’s series. That’s what he was doing at the Falls: taking photos for the next one. He was going to have a waterfall in it.”

Charlotte remembered the camera around his neck, the camera that was still there when they pulled him out of the river.

Louise got up and went into another room. She returned a moment later carrying a canvas, which she leaned up against a wall. “This is it: ‘The New Life,’” she said. “He worked on it all day Tuesday, all night too. He had a kind of epiphany out there in the hurricane.”

The painting showed a beatific Job and his wife facing a brilliant light that was descending from heaven in the midst of a whirlwind of mystical ecstasy. It was the Lord answering Job out of the cyclone.

Charlotte thought of Spiegel’s observation that although he had managed to penetrate the glass, he had yet to come out on the other side. In this painting, he had made it through. Then she noticed the Biblical quotation written across the top of the painting.

It was: “He bringeth down to the grave and bringeth up.”

Charlotte was sitting at home a week later reading an old issue of the
New York Post
that Vivian had left lying around. Sipping her coffee, she turned to “Page Six,” and found herself looking at a photo of Xantha and Arthur Lumkin at a Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute gala at the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza. Xantha, dripping diamonds and dressed in a gown that looked like an inverted mushroom, was standing on tiptoe to plant a kiss on Arthur’s cheek. Arthur, in white tie and tails, was looking sideways at a young man with black hair that curled down over his collar. A white-gloved waiter holding a silver tray of champagne flutes looked on. The caption was: “Lovebird Xantha Price, the oh-so-trendy fashion designer, gives hubby, financier Arthur Lumkin, a pretty peck on the cheek at the Costume Institute ball.” Studying the picture, Charlotte speculated on how to read it: the peck might have meant that Arthur and Xantha had made up, but it seemed more likely that the young man with the curly black hair had replaced Randy in Xantha’s affections. The “lovebird” might be a double entendre. In any case, it looked like the gossip page’s earlier prediction of a Lumkin-Price bust-up was wrong, to say nothing of the claptrap about the new emerald ring. Having been the subject of more than her share of gossip-page speculation herself, she should have known better than to believe it.